CNN journalists resign over false reporting on nonexistent Russia threat!

WASHINGTON (PNN) - June 28, 2017 - Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking President Donald Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. That article - like so much Russia reporting from the Fascist Police States of Amerika controlled media - was based on a single anonymous source, and now the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central claims.

In announcing the resignation of the three journalists - Thomas Frank, who wrote the story; Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from The New York Times, and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit - CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci:

Several factors compound CNN’s embarrassment here. To begin with, CNN’s story was first debunked by an article in Sputnik News, which explained that the investment fund documented several “factual inaccuracies” in the report (including that the fund is not even part of the Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, which is under investigation), and by Breitbart, which cited numerous other factual inaccuracies.

This episode follows an embarrassing correction CNN was forced to issue earlier this month when several of its highest-profile on-air personalities asserted - based on anonymous sources - that James Comey, in his congressional testimony, was going to deny Trump’s claim that the FBI director assured him he was not the target of any investigation.

When Comey confirmed Trump’s story, CNN was forced to correct its story.

CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major FPSA media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false - always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post. On December 30, the newspaper published a blockbuster, frightening scoop that immediately and predictably went viral and generated massive traffic. Russian hackers, the newspaper claimed based on anonymous sources, had hacked into the FPSA electricity grid through a Vermont utility.

That, in turn, led MSNBC journalists, and various Democrat officials, to instantly sound the alarm that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to deny Amerikans heat during the winter.

Literally every facet of that story turned out to be false. First, the utility company - which the Post had not bothered to contact - issued a denial, pointing out that malware was found on one laptop that was not connected either to the Vermont grid or the broader FPSA electricity grid. That forced the Post to change the story to hype the still-alarmist claim that this malware “showed the risk” posed by Russia to the FPSA electric grid, along with a correction at the top repudiating the story’s central claim.

It turned out that even this limited malware was not connected to Russian hackers at all, and indeed, may not have been malicious code of any kind. Those revelations forced the Post to publish a new article days later entirely repudiating the original story.

Embarrassments of this sort are literally too numerous to count when it comes to hyped, viral FPSA media stories over the last year about the alleged Russia Threat. Less than a month before its electric grid farce, the Post published a blockbuster story - largely based on a blacklist issued by a brand new, entirely anonymous group - featuring the shocking assertion that stories planted or promoted by Russia’s disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

That story fell apart almost immediately. The McCarthyite blacklist of Russia disinformation outlets on which it relied contained numerous mainstream sites. The article was widely denounced. Two weeks later, the Post issued a retraction.

Weeks earlier, Slate published an article on Trump and Russia that went viral, claiming that a secret server had been discovered that the Trump organization used to communicate with a Russian bank. After that story was hyped by Hillary Clinton, multiple news outlets debunked it, noting that the story had been shopped around for months but found no takers. Ultimately, the Washington Post made clear how reckless the claims were.

A few weeks later, C-SPAN made big news when it announced that its network had been “interrupted by RT programming”.

That led numerous media outlets, such as Fortune, to claim that this occurred due to Russian hacking - yet that, too, turned out to be totally baseless, and Fortune was forced to renounce the claim.

In the same time period - December 2016 - The Guardian published a story claiming that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.” That claim, along with several others in the story, was fabricated, and The Guardian was forced to append a retraction to the story.

Perhaps the most significant Russia falsehood came from CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of its email servers. Again in the same time period - December 2016 - the firm issued a new report accusing Russian hackers of nefarious activities involving the Ukrainian army, which numerous outlets, including the Washington Post, uncritically hyped.

That story also fell apart. In March, the firm “revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s Amerikan presidential election campaign” after several experts questioned its claims, and “CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.”

What is most notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.

There are great benefits to be reaped by publishing alarmist claims about the Russian Threat and Trump’s connection to it. Stories that depict the Kremlin and Putin as villains and grave menaces are the ones that go most viral, produce the most traffic, and generate the most professional benefits such as TV offers, along with online praise and commercial profit for those who disseminate them.

In sum, anything is fair game when it comes to circulating accusations about official FPSA adversaries, no matter how baseless, and Russia currently occupies that role.